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Ask HN: Are web development jobs over in the age of AI?

by colesantiago·10mo ago·2 comments·view on hn ↗

There are now tools available to everyone that wants to make web apps, Bolt, Replit, Loveable can do end to end web apps with a database attached and deployed in an afternoon.

Over time, the effort required to make web apps will trend to zero and there would be no reason any company would want to pay high salaries for web development jobs now that AI can do this job.

Is it over for web development jobs and careers now that AI is here?

What should engineers do instead of web development to get high salaries?

2 comments

More or less yes, but not necessarily because AI is taking over as much as companies taking what AI can do and evolving the role of web developer/engineer into something that is a hybrid and contains many disciplines.

This has been happening for like a decade, as far as I can tell. Web development has been increasingly easier and easier, both backend and frontend. This has made the role take on other responsibilities and recently it seems to me that web development or even software engineering for web, means that you need to be good at business management as well.

As a side note, I think this has been bad for the industry and AI will accelerate this "increase in entropy". Web apps tend to be fragile and require constant updates. Having worked at large companies, it's insane how often things are breaking and there are always "fires" to deal with that are never seen from the outside. All of this could be prevented. Working on software should be pleasant and predictable, but it requires companies to respect the discipline and invest in specialized engineers instead of giving every engineer the entire business vertical from ideation to releasing to production, telemetry and then post-launch analysis of how the product is doing. AI is just making this worse and I think web engineers are basically going to be a one-person company within a company.

No, but they will become 'web dev using AI' jobs. This is true for all engineering jobs. And eventually, all jobs.